Balancing Listening and Self Hate

I hate listening to my body. Living with cerebral palsy and chronic pain, you cant always listen to your body if you want to get things done, or just like have a daily routine. The problem is when  I get under the weather, I like to just power through until I get super sick and then I'm out for way too long . I got under the weather this past weekend when I stayed out too late listening to a friend, on top of just dysfunctional body issues. So for once, I listened to my body and slept more and actually took days off from working out. This created the feeling of failure, as I have been on this consist workout routine, with the point being to do the same workout for 100 days. Now my mind took this and decided that it had to be every day for 100 days, which was good for some points, it meant when I was on vacation in London I still made sure to do the same workout every day all weekend. The second side of this coin though was not wanting to give myself the time I need to heal when I'm just a little under the weather rather than waiting till I'm completely out cold. The problem is that the feelings of guilt, self-hate, a lack of consistency and inability to follow through on a routine, these thoughts rise up and overwhelm my mind entirely. This stronghold on my brain makes it harder as then it continues making excuses convincing me my body isn't well enough to work out for a variety of reasons, breaking through these reasons are harder than just getting up and working out. This can very easily derail the entire process of already working out the same workout for 26 days. Picking myself back up and controlling my mind while balancing my body is hard, but the feeling after the workout makes it worth it. Not the physical spasms and sweat, rather the feeling of owning my mind for that short time.

This Last Year in review

So I am super staunch in always convincing myself that the New Year is in December when we come upon the Jewish New Year and basically just running away from looking back over what was the past of any time. So now I'm combining my year in university with the Jewish New Year and looking back at all the things I've learned and experienced into a list cuz I like lists.

1. Finding and living my authentic self is the hardest journey with the most rewarding views, along the ever-changing path of life.
2. Finding your north star changes through the storms but is always there.
3. Identity evolves. The question is are you listening and willing to evolve or are you going to try and lock up the evolution.
4. Fine is my "cop-out" word for saying something is wrong. When that is the mantra running through my head I'm heading down the wrong path.
5. Feeling and processing pain is the only way to find an equilibrium of honesty in yourself.
6. The fear of emotional pain is worse than the emotional pain, as the fear never ends and the pain does.
7. Failure is rather healing, as hitting rock bottom removes the fear of hitting rock bottom.
8. The balancing act is impossible if you give yourself no place to drop a ball you're juggling, after learning that all the balls cycle through you can focus on the ones you are holding at that time.
9. Society's perception of health is engrained deeper than you think, and your own family pressures don't help. The stigma of Mental hospitals and wards depicted in society's movies and such, makes it harder to believe and trust that they are a place of healing, when in fact they are just another ward, like the neurological ward.
10. Psychiatric medication isn't the devil, rather it gives you chemicals you are lacking in your brain that help you live your best self.
11. The shame pushed on you by others and society stems from fear, breaking that cycle within yourself does not mean the rest of the world has moved on with you.
12. Secrets rot, no matter how well you think you have packaged them away in the recesses of your brain are still there and only once you process and heal can you move forward.
13. A healthy amount of pressure creates diamonds of success after the pressure cleans off failures and misconceptions.
14. Tempering myself to the extent of losing my inner compass kills me, and doesn't help me fit in with those around me.
15. Learning to put blinders on the idea of comparison to other people's perceived success, or even their own success leaves you way more energy to focus on your own path. 
16. The more you learn to give yourself patience, gives you more patience to build relationships with others.
17. When driven by fear you end of in scarier places.
18. The people looking for perfection are the ones not moving forward.
19. The people who don't understand your honesty are usually afraid of not living their own.
20. You can have many different facets at any time and they are all valid.

Here is to a new year filled with growth, happiness, and reaching new goals

The Fear of Always Being Broken

My first thought for the title of this post was "the fear of never getting back to being healthy". The major problem with this title that I found for me was that I have this illusion of healthy that I want to get back to. For me its the year 2015 I was living in Florida training for the Paralympics in rowing, that includes training twice a day most days and then even managing two semesters in community college. Now my mind like many minds likes to gloss over the weekends I spent curled up in my closet in this silent stunned dysfunction, freaking out from thunder sending my mind on loops about dying from some PTS after an incident in the summer war (that's a story for another time). While I was having fewer struggles with my binge eating disorders (partially because I wasn't fully aware of the depth of the issue) there were totally Friday binges and then Saturday and Sunday fasts. The problem that is created with cracking holes in my facade of the perfect year, is the feeling that comes from that, the feeling of having never actually been ok. This realization of never actually being ok before leads my mind down the rabbit hole of anxiety, always being broken, never being whole within myself. This leads to intense fear about a personal inability to be whole within me. It does release the idea of getting back to myself, which in some ways creates the opportunity to be better every single day, yet creates a larger fear of the unknown, and feeling like I have no idea what tools I need to get to this place of being not broken. In a way, this creates the necessity of being ok with being in a broken state while still working to no longer being in this state, which is rather hard to achieve. I'm not sure the fear will ever disappear, and I'm not sure it would be healthy for it to completely disappear,hopefully, I will at least learn better tools in which to function in the fear.

Self Made Thought Blocks

My mind creates its own thought blocks. It puts up blocks against passions, dreams, an ability to feel and process what is going on. I only realized this when I was on three hours of sleep and was able to just speak my mind to my psychologist and dietician without my anxious mind stopping me from saying what I actually felt and thought. This feeling scared me as I realized how much my mind is able to hide from me during my day to day when I am trying to function on more than three hours of sleep. I'm glad I figured out that I am hiding from myself, although it sucks to know I can do that to myself, hiding dreams, issues, and thoughts. Writing this I feel crazy saying that I don't know all the thoughts running through my head, but knowing how messy and confusing my mind is, makes it a bit less upsetting. Understanding my creation of blocks can give me the opportunity to try to figure out what the blocks are being put up in front of, and how to start moving them individually. Just thinking about it as I am writing now in the middle of the night, one of the main blocks that has been coming up for me lately is blocking any idea of dreaming about I want to do in my life, instead of dreaming big which I used to do. I have somehow blocked my dreams and ability to think about new ones. Part of that is my large fear of failure, leading from an unhealthy obsession with perfection (that I'll leave for another blog post). Thought blocks come partially from my anxiety, that isn't a good reason to leave them be. Time to sit inside my mind and make some order.

Falling feelings like a Failing

I hate falling. Not mentally falling, but physically crashing to the ground. I hate when my legs collapse without letting my brain know beforehand so I can prepare and not try to stand up and walk at that exact moment. Yes, I have the privilege of being able to stand up and walk short distances and I know that it is a privilege that not everyone has. That being said my disability and functional sometimes legs don't usually give me a warning when they like to take a break while on duty. The issue becomes that my first thought and feeling when I fall is a failure which leads to an extreme feeling of anger at myself. The anger is automatic, I feel it before I allow myself to feel the physical pain of hurting myself during the fall. I hate the feeling that is underlying the anger, the lack of control that rears its ugly head every time my body does something without me telling it to, or giving me a signal before. It is one of my biggest struggles with my disability, the lack of stability in my body,but more importantly the lack of me having any preemptive knowledge of how my body is going to react to trying to get out of chair, standing up or bending down to pick things up, or grasping a glass to drink,amongst many of the daily tasks. The lack of control in the specific moment of the fall is large but it isn't necessarily the worst thing to happen.  The problem is the shame and anger combine into an almost lethal amount of self-hate, and the desire to be in control of the pain dished out to my body. This usually leads to a confrontation between me and the person asking if I need help,as I am not angry at them,rather my body,but in that moment I do not have the emotional capacity to explain that to the person trying to help me. Figuring this out is helpful for me but I have yet to be able to take this understanding and turn it into practice when I fall.

Fresh Showers of Tears

Tears. I have fought myself for years about tears and shedding them. I always felt like they showed too much emotion and weakness to myself and others. The lack of letting myself cry, even when I started to tear up, I would brush them away and force my emotions back inside my body. The evolution of letting the tears fall came super slowly, from realizing that pushing the tears back inside made the wave of emotions I didn't understand stronger. Letting the tears fall is still hard doesn't matter if I'm in a safe space with someone or on my own I still feel the shame of letting my pain and 'weakness' show. Sometimes it's even worse on my own, as the voices in my head telling me I don't have a good reason to cry and trying to remove me from feeling the pain and being in the moment. The thing is I've felt better after every time I've cried, regardless if my reality has changed or not the tears were a shower of calm. Personally, I find the best is crying in the shower with music on, it somehow has the strongest release of emotion. Tears are hard, I think I learned growing up in a lot of physical pain that no one could take away that tears scared others around me, so I stopped crying and put up a brave face. The problem was I didn't learn a good way to deal with the pain so it turned into a myriad of ways of self-harm. Self-harm doesn't always look the same, my self-harm journey has many twists and turns and I will write about it someday, but for now cry when you are in pain, and when someone around you cries,sit and allow them a safe space to let the self shower of tears fall.

Hating the Fall after the Rise

The Fall is always the same. The problem is the Rise looks different, today it was studying for five hours straight on an empty stomach. A few days ago it was sleeping during the day after not sleeping at night. Sometimes its spending time with family, sometimes it's being alone for a weekend thinking I'm doing self-care. The fall used to be the worst thing that could happen to me as I never believed I'd get to another Rise, which sent me into a deeper depressive cycle then what the down needed to be. Now I understand the cycle a bit, it doesn't necessarily make it easy to go through, but when I get to a certain place, I understand where I am and am more easily able to just be in that space in the cycle of the rise and fall. The fall is sometimes where my most creative moments happen, but it's also where some of my most self-loathing thoughts emerge from. The balancing game is to figure out how long can you allow yourself to fall down the never-ending black-hole, while still managing to see the sparkling diamonds of the high. The rise wouldn't come without the fall.  It is learning to love each place, the dark and wet creative place, and the warmth of the sparkling high and the time it takes to reach both places, and the cycle, knowing you will be back in both places again.